AOL
Comics A.M. | Comic-Con passes sell out, Rep. John Lewis to co-author GN
Isotope's "FailFrog" button
Comic-Con | Badges for Comic-Con International sold out Saturday during a marathon online-registration session that taxed the servers of convention sales partner TicketLeap and frustrated ticket buyers. Four-day passes were gone by about 2 p.m. PT; the event sold out by 6 p.m. (Additional passes may become available as cancellations are processed.) As we noted earlier, San Francisco comics retailer Isotope is memorializing Saturday’s experience with a “San Diego Comic Con 2011 Registration Disaster Commemorative Fail Frog button,” featuring a modified version of the TicketLeap logo that frustrated users saw every time they refreshed their web browser.
On the TicketLeap company blog, CEO Chris Stanchak acknowledged that “our platform experienced capacity issues for a 4 hour period” on Saturday: “While we knew the event was going to put significant demand on our system, we did not expect the traffic we received. [...] The traffic we received yesterday was several orders of magnitude higher than our high end estimate. Due to the heavy strain on the system, users for all events across our system received ‘Over Capacity’ errors. This prevented ticket buyers from buying tickets and it prevented event organizers from managing their events.” Tom Spurgeon offers commentary. [Comic-Con International]
- February 7, 2011 @ 08:09 AM by Kevin Melrose
AOL hopes to cut a whopping 2,500 jobs
AOL
AOL, which has been described as an albatross around the neck of DC Comics parent company Time Warner, plans to shed more than a third of its workforce as it spins off from the media giant next month.
Although earlier speculation placed layoffs at about 1,000, the struggling Internet company announced this morning that it will ask 2,500 of its 6,900 employees to accept buyouts. If it can’t find enough volunteers, AOL will resort to layoffs. The announcement, part of an effort to cut $300 million in annual costs, comes a little more than a week after 100 layoffs.
Founded in 1983 as Quantum Computer Services, AOL at one point boasted 30 million subscribers, a number that shrank considerably after its 2001 merger with Time Warner — a disastrous deal that resulted in a record $99-billion loss for the (briefly) rebranded AOL Time Warner and the removal of Steve Case as chairman.
AOL, which The Associated Press points out still makes money, counts among its operations the comics blog Comics Alliance, the tech blog Engadget, the video-game blog Joystiq and, in partnership with Time Warner’s Telepictures Productions, the high-profile celebrity-news site TMZ.com.
- November 19, 2009 @ 11:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Blue Bloods: Masquerade
Publishing | Italian movie producer Domenico Procacci has purchased Bologna-based graphic novel publisher Coconino Press, adding it to his Fandango filmmaking and book-publishing company. In addition to its own titles, Coconino publishes the Italian editions of works by such artists as Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi. [Variety]
Publishing | Young-adult novelist Melissa de la Cruz has signed new contracts with Hyperion, the Disney Book Group imprint that publishes her bestselling Blue Bloods series. The deal calls for three companion books to the teen-vampire drama, including Blue Bloods: The Graphic Novel. [Variety]
The Last Unicorn
Publishing | IDW Publishing will adapt Peter Beagle’s bestselling 1968 fantasy novel The Last Unicorn as a six-issue miniseries. The comic, by writer Peter B. Gillis, artist Renae De Liz and colorist Ray Dillon, will debut in April. [ICv2.com]
Publishing | Simon Jones offers commentary about declining manga sales in Japan: “Some blame was again placed at the industry’s increasing focus on niche genres (just as comics is a spandex ghetto, manga is facing a crisis of the moe slum), but I think this is being overstated as a cause, when it’s really a symptom that is self-feeding. Manga sales have gone down … it could be lower birth rates, or competition from other media, or internet piracy (come on guys, we don’t need to couch this in flowery language), or any combination of those. But it all comes down to fewer companies being able to produce mainstream products, because a growing segment of mainstream audiences are no longer willing to pay for them despite increasing demand.” [Icarus Publishing]
- November 17, 2009 @ 07:37 AM by Kevin Melrose